Democracy
Futures
Project
What is the democracy futures project?
The Democracy Futures Project is an initiative to develop the capacity of philanthropies to think long-term about American democracy. It is an 18-month collaborative effort to equip democracy funders with tools, resources, and skills to be more “future-ready.”
The Project Will:
• Build Funders’ Foresight Capacity: Help U.S. democracy funders develop foresight capacities, including the ability to think long-term and expansively about the potential futures we may be operating in.
• Empower Trend-Spotting and Vision-Setting: Explore powerful trends such as generative AI, climate change, demography, and what they might mean for a democratic America in 2050.
• Imagine Possibilities: Enable funders to think optimistically and proactively about our work, in ways that inspire and empower the same from our grantees, partners, and others.
• Identify Promising Strategies & Tactics: Stress-test our current strategies against several different (both optimistic and problematic) potential futures, to help identify core priorities and tactics necessary to promote democracy in the decades ahead.
Featured resources
The School of International Futures explores how Future Design can be used to enhance a wide range of existing and emerging practices.
Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies and Philea explore how philanthropy can apply foresight and futures thinking to live up to its potential of being forward-looking, risk-taking, and innovative.
A call to action from the Democracy Funders Network that shares insights on why positive visioning matters.
A paper from the Democracy Fund. Urges funders to understand the “chaos factors” in front of us which may hold the secret to readying the pro-democracy field for the future.
Philanthropic institutions are invited to participate.
The experience includes 3 in-person and 1 hybrid workshop between September 2024 and December 2025 with topics including:
• Building capacity for futures, foresight, and divergent thinking.
• Developing scenarios and creating visions
• Preparing for uncertainty and stress-testing strategies
• Action-planning for a hopeful future
Following each workshop, there will be a public-facing virtual session to reflect and share learnings, and a resource will be published to offer reflections and considerations to the philanthropic field.
Complete alignment on all desired outcomes or tactics is neither likely nor necessary. The project will provide a collaborative visioning, skill-building, and sense-making process among peers with different vantage points, experiences, and perspectives. While the project intends to generate high-level, pragmatic, and broadly applicable insights and provocations for philanthropy writ-large, individual participants will build capacity and skills through this experience which they can adapt and apply to their own strategies and funding portfolios.
To express interest, please email Futures@PACEfunders.org
the experience
The Democracy Futures Project is structured in 4 stages between September 2024 and December 2025. Each stage will consist of:
• A skill-building workshop (3 in-person and 1 virtual/hybrid)
• A reflective virtual session (1-month post-workshop)
• A tangible report or resource (1-month post-virtual session)
Stage timeframe: Late Summer 2024 – Early Winter 2025
In-person workshop dates: October 2024 in the California Bay Area
This stage of the work will focus on thinking expansively about the future. It will introduce and share the principles of futures/strategic foresight, and the tools to support it, including:
• Outside-in thinking (identifying the broader forces shaping democracy)
• Multiple perspectives (taking account of a wide range of viewpoints)
• Long-term horizons (encouraging participants to consider longer sweeps of time)
Participants will use these tools to imagine some creative future possibilities for US democracy by 2050. The purpose of this stage is to begin building skills and identifying techniques to develop democracy funders’ capacity to think expansively about the future.
Stage timeframe: Late Winter 2025 – Spring 2025
In-person workshop dates: TBD (estimated March or April 2025)
This stage of work is about “making sense” of the collection of divergent futures we began identifying in Stage 1. A draft set of scenarios about American democracy in 2050 will be presented (including at least one positive vision and at least one dystopian future); Stage 2 will allow us to build out and develop them collectively.
The purpose of this stage is to envision what the world might look like in 2050, together. This provides a platform for later conversations, where we will begin to consider philanthropic actions that will help funders move towards their preferred visions; the goal is not that agreement or consensus will be reached about an ideal scenario.
Stage timeframe: Summer 2025
Hybrid workshop dates: TBD (estimated June 2025)
Stage 3 will take the scenarios/preferred futures identified in stage 2 and begin discussing and stress-testing philanthropic strategies and learning to prepare for uncertainty, no matter what the future holds.
The purpose of this stage is to help participants prepare (at a high-level) for each identified scenario. The goal is to ensure democracy funders’ strategies are “robust” against uncertainty and they are thinking about the directions needed to achieve their long-term visions.
Stage timeframe: Fall – Winter 2025
In-person workshop dates: TBD (estimated October 2025)
The final stage will identify practical actions (across multiple time scales) to ensure that democracy funders can actively shape the future towards a more preferred future.
The purpose is to help funders build their agency and ability to create better futures. The goal is to identify specific actions (whether in 1, 5, 10, or 20 years time horizons) that could enable a preferred future, and/or will be necessary across all potential futures.
Why this initiative? Why now?
Democracy funders are largely “playing defense” and responding to short-term threats to our system of government and governance. Those threats are real, and that is important and necessary work; however, it needs to be coupled with aspirational, long-term, proactive planning.
We need to lean into imagination and envision a future for multi-racial, multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic democracy, while also embracing realism and pragmatism in order to understand and address barriers to achieve it.
This type of vision will:
This matters because research shows positive, asset-based framing and narratives are more likely to motivate pro-democracy attitudes and actions.
This matters because experience shows many people don’t believe their actions make a difference and that the problems are too big for them to influence.
This matters because research shows people are less likely to support the principles of democracy if they fear they will inhibit realizing their political preferences. Too often funding flows in a boom-and-bust cycle around elections without consideration of the work that happens every day and outside of political systems.
This matters because conflict entrepreneurship and other systems that seek to divide us are strong and well-resourced; we need to have counter-cultural interventions that model that another way is possible, and provide the “permission structure” to explore them.
American democracy has never lived up to its full potential, but a positive long-term future requires us to constantly imagine and work towards what is possible. While we will be aspirational in the work ahead, we should be clear-eyed that not all future visions for democracy may be positive or hopeful. We will also need to consider and plan for futures that are not ideal but will still require a thoughtful, coordinated, proactive, and pragmatic philanthropic response.